


Memorial

by zeldadestry



Category: Great Gatsby - Fitzgerald
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-23
Updated: 2009-12-23
Packaged: 2017-10-05 01:14:57
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 400
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/36157
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zeldadestry/pseuds/zeldadestry
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Nick will never forget.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Memorial

**Author's Note:**

  * For [](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts).



I rarely look back at what I wrote in my early thirties but when I do risk a glance, inevitably on nights when I've had too many glasses of wine, I wonder that I could have ever been so young and stupid.

How dared I have considered myself an honest man? I see now that my mistake was in believing a man could know himself. I suppose we are all much like the owl-eyed man, the thick glasses of our perspective both magnify and warp the world around us. We stumble through best we can, often aware of a critical message that our vision inevitably distorts as we struggle to make out its letters.

If all of us are liars, how many of us are thieves? How many of us stole from Gatsby, crushing both his life and his dream?

Gatsby had killed a man, as the rumors went, but his only victim was himself. James Gatz fell and an impossible ideal rose to take his place.

As month after month of the lonely Chicago winters pass, I long for spring and most of all for summer. It is in summer that I feel closest to him.

Sometimes it is the cut of a coat that reminds me so irresistibly of him, or trousers of pale yellow linen. Sometimes it is the baffled delight on a man's face when his wife or girlfriend takes his hand and I know he wonders how he came to be hers, she who seems so perfect and so fresh.

Atlantic City. Montreal. They were both good suggestions for where he might have traveled. I wish it would have made a difference to him if I had offered myself as a companion, but he never would have left Daisy behind.

And what if I did not leave him alone that day for the office? Apart from him and haunted by a shadow, a presentiment of the tragedy unfolding, I could not work. I should have stayed beside him, even placed my body in front of his when the desperate moment arrived.

And what if I, in one primal, promethean lunge, spoke? "She doesn't need you. I do."

It remains the easiest thing in the world for me to imagine the story blooming some other way.

All of us have a green light and I suppose fate could only consider it just that Gatsby became mine.


End file.
